"Expert Contribution on OOXML Versioning"

[Norbert Bollow]

MURATA Makoto <eb2m-mrt at asahi-net.or.jp> wrote:

> I read your document "Expert Contribution on OOXML Versioning".

Thank you! I should perhaps explain that it was not my idea to
write this little paper, or to call it "expert contribution",
but it was a request from out of the Swiss mirror committee to
become more active in working towards a resolution of this issue.

> In the past, some WG4 participants have expessed concerns about the
> interactions or conflicts betweeen the versioning attribute and MCE. 
> But your document does not  mention MCE.  It is still not clear to me
> whether or not the versioning attribute works for your three use cases
> when MCE-based extensions are present.

Even a simple version attribute would even in the presence of
MCE-based extensions suffice to address the complexity that
comes from the existence of different versions of the OOXML
specification. It would however obviously not help with
complexity related to MCE extensions, which in some cases might
also justify use of separate import filters etc.

My current preference would be for a version attribute which
encodes the ISO/IEC publication year of the base version of the
standard together with a single integer number indicating a
"patch level" in terms of amendmends and corrigenda. Obviously
it would need to be standardized which integer number value
corresponds to which set of amendmends and corrigenda.

For example, the version attribute could look like this:

  iso-iec:version="2008.3"

and this could be defined to mean something like

  "ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008+COR1+AMD1+COR2; ISO/IEC 29500-2:2008+COR1;
   ISO/IEC 29500-3:2008+COR1; ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008+COR1+AMD1+COR2"

The namespace prefix iso-iec would be declared as an ignorable
namespace in order to ensure that conformant implementations of
Ecma-376 ed.1 will certainly be able to tolerate its presence.

I think that the best place to define values for the versioning
attribute would be in a new, very short, ISO/IEC 29500-0, which
would contain informative text giving an overview of ISO/IEC 29500
and normative text defining version attribute values. I believe
that ISO/IEC has a way in which it could be specially designated
to allow relatively easy frequent updating (i.e. whenever new AMDs
and CORs are created.)

The potential presence of MCE does not in any way conflict with this,
and it does not conflict with validation against the appropriate
schema indicated by this version attribute, provided that the
validation process is carried out as indicated in ISO/IEC 29500-3
by ignoring elements and attributes from ignorable namespaces.

The above proposal however obviously does not help with versioning
and validation of MCE extensions, which I agree is wothwhile goal
in its own right, but it's clearly too complex to allow it to be
addressed by a simple version attribute. If we want such extensions
to be carefully versioned, that would need a significantly more
complex mechanism, that somehow addresses also the case of extension
namespace elements and attributes being preserved by an application
which does not understand them. At the current stage of the evolution
of OOXML I doubt that we have enough experience with this kind of
use-cases that it would make sense to standardize this at the current
stage.

> At this stage, I do not think that WG4 can reach some consensus even
> if I add this topic to the agenda for our next phone conference.

On the other hand, I think from the comments of various national
bodies (not just Switzerland) it is also clear that the current
situation witout proper versioning information also does not reflect
any kind of consensus of ISO/IEC national bodies.

> Are you willing to study the interactions and possible conflicts
> between the versioning attribute and MCE?

Yes, absolutely, provided someone puts me in touch with real-life
use-cases of MCE.

Greetings,
Norbert

-- 
Representative in matters of international standardization
of the Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open - http://ch-open.ch

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